I know this is a shitpost, but I honestly think that was better. In the past couple years I’ve bought an mp3 player, and dslr camera, and a pocket sized e-reader, and a retro gaming handheld, and it feels so much better swapping between them when I’m doing something than just staring at the little hell rectangle for 12 hours a day.

Asking the solution to doomerism is asking the question backward. Doomerism is a rational response to the rich and powerful steering civilization directly into climate catastrophe. Oil companies have known for at least 60 years that they were negatively affecting the climate, but there’s been a bipartisan project to not only shield them from accountability, but to actively empower them to continue the destruction. All of the most powerful state apparatuses in the world serve the same death cult.

If you want to stop doomerism, you should become a green socialist. Tear down the power structures that suppress green alternatives. Oppose oil lines, oppose AI data centers, shut down the corporations, the governments, the shills. Stop letting them steer the ship toward destruction.

The solution to that “can’t find love” feeling is more complex, but it’s equally as tied up in the current state of global capitalism. Basically every major government has spent the last fifty years trying to squeeze people as much as possible to the point that everything’s expensive and nothing works. We’re all alienated, we all have various traumas handed down to us by our boomer parents and no real way to heal from them that’s not reliant on others. Our communities have been destroyed over and over again because community stands in the way of capital.

Destroying capitalism probably won’t fix the entrenched ideologies that keep us miserable, but we can’t start trying to fix the entrenched ideologies until we destroy capitalism.

Hey, an actual shower thought

Liam (The Plant Slant) does short form video that’s aimed at combating misinformation and giving simple advice for forming nutrition habits

I filmed a lake with dark clouds over it a couple weeks ago for a video outro, set my phone up at the edge of a dock, held onto it the entire time. Could not stop thinking about how screwed I’d be if I had a hand spasm, or if there was a gust of heavy wind, or if the dock suddenly shook and my phone dropped into the lake.

The person who wrote that fancies themselves someone who can manipulate circumstances to their favor through means other than action, such as through social manipulation or persuasion, not realizing that sometimes conditions require changing hearts and minds and sometimes conditions require putting your body on the line.

Reading anything without the help of AI will help you become a better writer because you’ll learn new ways of using words and sentences and syntax in a way that people write naturally. It seems weird to focus on Marxism, but if that’s what gets you reading, go for it.

Libertarian used to be a polite word for anarchist, it was a contrast to authoritarian. Libertarian socialists still see themselves as part of a historical tradition as an alternative to authoritarian socialists, though that’s more European than American. Then there was a political project of European and American conservatives to redefine libertarians to mean conservatives who believed in strong property rights and a weak state.

Anarchism is a broad ideology against authority. Anarchists are against private property rights because if there is private property, there must be an authority to enforce those rights. Instead, anarchists point to pre-civilization methods of carving out individual spaces from the commons so that people can live without having to “make a living.”

There’s been a massive propaganda push by governments and state powers to define anarchist as “bomb-thrower,” or to try and make anarchist ideas seem ridiculous, but anarchists are extremely invested in people recognizing themselves as moral agents invested in communal good while maintaining individuality. if you’re interested in anarchist ideas, try reading non-fiction like David Graeber, or fiction like Ursula K LeGuin, or speeches by Emma Goldman. Don’t let people on social media’s knee-jerk reaction against anarchism turn you off. Even if you end up not being an anarchist, you can at least engage with the ideas and maybe find some stuff that resonates with you.

Ocarina of Time is my GOAT. Finishing it as a kid and realizing that games could be more than just killing time, that they could be epic journeys with satisfying endings, that they could be a whole art form was really transformative.

Yeah, that headline is incorrect. The laws are there specifically to surveil adults, “for child safety” is a smokescreen justification. This isn’t a “we tried to do a good thing, but there’s this unfortunate side effect,” the surveillance was the goal.